Q. I'd like to
begin with a paraphrase of a critical response that is being made to The
Aesthetic Dimension, which is that Marcuse has finally shown himself
not to be a Marxist.
A. This criticism,
of course, I knew beforehand. And the book was written intentionally in
a provocative way to reply exactly to that accusation. In the first place,
I don't care what label is being given me; nothing could be of less interest
to me. Secondly, I quote old man Marx himself, who said, "Moi
je ne suis pas Marxiste." In English: "I myself am not a
Marxist." So, if you look at many of the people who today call themselves
Marxists, I don't mind if I don't belong to the same group and don't have
the same label.
To be a little more serious
about it, I do claim to be a Marxist. I do believe that his analysis of
the capitalist society and the basic mechanisms which keep it going are
still, today, more valid than ever before. As you may know, there is no
such thing as a theory of socialism in Marx; there are only a few remarks.
He never elaborated on them because he never claimed to be a prophet,
and it would make no sense to give a prescription for the behavior of
people in a free society which does not yet exist. That's a contradiction
in itself.
Now I did not claim in
my little book that art is free from social determination, but I do deny
that the social determinants affect the very substance of the work.
One can formulate that by saying that the social determinants pertain
to the style of the work but not to its substance or quality. Let's take
an example?Hamlet, or, for that matter, any other of Shakespeare's plays.
How much can you learn from these plays about the real workings of the
society in which Shakespeare lived? I would say absolutely nothing. Nor
is Hamlet in any way adequately understood by pointing to the social
determinants. "To be or not to be" transcends any kind of social
determination. And it will prove true, in different forms, for every and
any kind of society.
I have at the beginning
of The Aesthetic Dimension outlined what social determination of
art I think does indeed prevail: it is, essentially, the material, the
tradition, the historical horizon under which the writer, the artist,
has to work. He cannot ignore it. He lives in a continuum of tradition
even when he breaks it. This social determination affects any work of
art. But, as I said, it does not constitute its substance.
Q. To be more specific
about this criticism of The Aesthetic Dimension, it is that you
have made the aesthetic a transcendental category.
A. That is not
the case, because I think I use the term transhistorical. Transhistorical
means transcending every and any particular stage of the historical
process, but not transcending the historical process as a whole. That
should be evident, because we cannot think of anything under the sun that
could transcend the historical process as a whole. Everything is in history,
even nature.
Q. Historically,
would you say that the aesthetic appears as a dimension as a result or
consequence of the Enlightenment, or what marks for Hegel the emergence
of self-consciousness? Secondly, would you say that as capitalism
ceases to be a progressive force in history that the aesthetic dimension
becomes less accessible because late capitalism cannot tolerate its critical
potential . . .
A. May I interrupt
you: it cannot "tolerate"? I think we have seen today that there
seems to be hardly anything that capitalist society cannot tolerate. It
incorporated and accepted the most radical and avant-garde forms
of art and literature. You can buy them in the drug store. But I think
that this does not affect or detract from the quality and truth of these
"accepted" works of art. Let's take an example from the visual
arts: a statue by Barlach, or the artistic value and truth of a statue
by Rodin. It is in no way reduced or falsified if you put that statue,
as happens today, in the lobby of a bank or in
MARCUSE | 417
the lobby of the offices
of a big corporation. What has changed is the receptivity of the consumer,
not the work of art itself. James Joyce remains James Joyce; whether you
can buy him at the drug store makes no difference. A Beethoven quartet
remains what it is even if it's played over the radio while you are doing
the dishes.
Q. Doesn't that
last example speak more of the historically affirmative nature of art
that survives today as opposed to the negative: that this society is still
able to appreciate a certain kind of labor that is not being reproduced
by this society?
A. You say this
society: as a whole? Or only certain groups? The majority of the population
has always been excluded from this relation to art, due to the separation
between intellectual and material production to which art necessarily
succumbs. You said that it would be characteristic of the affirmative
function of art. I would say this is correct, but art by itself cannot
under any circumstances change the social condition. And that is the necessary
and essential powerlessness of art, that it cannot have an effective,
direct impact on the praxis of change. I don't know of any case in which
you could say that art has changed the established society. Art can prepare
such change. Art can contribute to it only via several negations and mediations,
the most important being the change of consciousness and, especially,
the change of perception. I think we can say that after the impressionists,
after Cézanne especially, we see differently than we saw before.
That you can say; further you cannot go.
Q. You speak of
the bifurcation of mental and material labor, and suggest that
art is able to preserve in its autonomy, in its separation from material
production, a certain promise of liberation. With the presence of "surplus
repression" in advanced capitalism, is it possible that art's autonomy
can actually serve advanced capitalism insofar as the labor we see in
art, if not unalienated, is maintained as separate, as special, as "other"
from material production? To go back to the Gründrisse, Marx
makes a very strong case for the ontological dimension of labor?that it
not be seen simply as sacrifice, but that labor itself is a unifying principle
of human life.
A. What kind of
labor? The labor on the assembly line? Marx certainly didn't mean that.
He meant labor in a socialist society, but not in a capitalist society.
He saw the possibility of reducing alienated labor already in capitalism,
namely as a consequence of technical
418�� |������ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
progress or, as we would
say today, increasing automation, mechanization, computerization, whatever
you want to call it. That, however, is only the anticipation, or the first
traces, of the liberation of the human being from full�time alienated
labor?I say full-time alienation because alienated labor
as such can never be abrogated. There will always have to be persons who
adjust machines, who read gauges or whatever it is. So, alienated labor,
and Marx said this, can never be entirely abrogated. But it can be reduced
quantitatively and qualitatively so that it's no longer a full-time
occupation to which the individual is bound during his or her entire personal
and social life.
Q. But isn't it
only in the realm of art, in its aesthetic dimension, that we are given
the promise of a labor that is not simply the accommodation of oneself
to a gauge or a machine?
A. Yes. And that
is one of the interconnections and relations be�tween art and, let's say,
critical theory or revolutionary theory.
Q. Then the function
of art is always one of mediation?
A. Yes. A mediation,
but also more than that because art can represent the image of the human
condition as it is rooted above and beyond the social sphere, which was
my main point in relating art to Eros; art represents conflicts, hopes,
and sufferings which cannot in any way be settled by the class struggle.
We can again say in a transhistorical sense that there are permanent and
eternal conflicts in the human condition, in the relation between human
beings and between man and nature which transcend the entire sphere of
the class struggle. Erotic conflicts and primary aggression can change
their humiliating and destructive form in a socialist society, but they
will continue to exist.
Q. Does your having
written The Aesthetic Dimension imply that the philosopher has
a primary critical function that the artist may or may not have?
A. Yes. Let me
give you an example. The Marxist theory can reveal and represent the inner
mechanisms and dynamics of capitalist society, especially in the economic
sphere. Art cannot do this. The demand made by Brecht, for example, that
art should represent the totality of the production relations in a given
society is in my view absolutely contradictory to the potentiality of
art. It cannot; nor can
MARCUSE | 419
art represent the extreme
horror in the prevailing reality. We have here a good example, namely,
the Holocaust.
Q. Since we have
come to the Holocaust, in your book you almost seem to beg the question--it
struck me as almost a Verneinung--when you bring in Leni
Riefenstahl parenthetically as having filmed the beauty of a fascist feast.
Is it possible to find art in a fascist form?
A. Yes?as exiled
art and hidden art—but in no other way. I have asked this question
myself many times, also, in the form: is there such a thing as fascist
art? And I think I would like to deny it, but I must confess that one
has probably to reformulate the question, because you cannot deny that
there is literature produced by writers with strong proto-fascist
features, at least utterly reactionary ones?the case of Dostoevsky, the
case of Yeats. And there are more, but whenever I want to think of them
I repress their names. . . . So, it is possible that a distinct reactionary
and a repressive authoritarian can produce authentic literature. The question
is: under what historical conditions?
Q. But there was
a certain manipulation of conceptions of beauty in Nazi Germany, which
may have been simply a devaluation of the aesthetic handed to it, of the
tradition of art before it. But it did try to take the idea of an aesthetic
form and call that art and in the process deny the Eros principle which
underlies your own definition of the aesthetic.
A. It is a realism that conceals, that hides
what reality actually is. And that, of course, is opposed to the very
essence of art. Art should reveal and not conceal.
Q. Can you speak,
then, of a successful art, an art that presents the problem properly?
In Yeats, for instance, I never feel that he is presenting the problem
correctly because in his poetry he is always invoking an archaic class
structure which somehow denies the reality of his moment.
A. He denies the
reality, but I would say in spite of everything he also preserves the
images of a very different reality. I am not a Yeats expert. As a layman,
this is my feeling when I read him.
Q. To what extent,
then, would you deny, to go to the other extreme, art in its radical forms
in our society?
420 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
A. Art in its radical
forms—the present day avant-garde, for example: I would say
yes, it is art. But the question is to what extent aesthetic criteria
can be applied to some manifestations of avant-garde art. I had
a long discussion on that here with the Visual Arts department two or
three years ago. There was an exhibit that simply reproduced a garage
sale. That wouldn't do because it just isn't art; it's a repetition of
the given reality. It does not have the transcendence and dissociation
which in my view are essential for art.
Q. In general,
that seems very similar to Lukács, who grants his aesthetic approval
to Balzac and denies it to a certain extent to Flaubert and to Zola for
reasons not too unlike yours.
A. I would say
there is indeed a difference in quality between the Comédie
Humaine and the Rougon-Macquart. It is not so obvious
in Flaubert.
Q. After 1848,
which should have marked the passing of capitalism, art entered a decadent
subject-object split, according to Lukács, which became increasingly
irreconcilable, as evidenced, for instance, in Flaubert and Zola. My question
is whether avant-garde art today can be seen as having finally assumed
in some instances a more tactical position in its radical form, having
finally realized that because Duchamps could be recuperated in a museum
and could be given a monetary value, that it is the function of radical
art to deny late capitalism the aesthetic completely?
A. Art continues in late capitalism. It might be the case that
it is co-opted, but again that would mean something in terms of the recipient
of art but not to the work of art itself. The work of art itself doesn't
change. And by the way, decadent, you know, is a favorite fascist and
Nazi slogan and we should be very, very careful in using it. Is Rimbaud
decadent? Of course he's decadent, but at the same time he's a great poet.
So was Baudelaire. And in this respect Lukács is certainly not
a guide.
Q. What I want
to ask now is related to the subject-object split, to the Oedipus
complex and the weakening of the function of the father in society today.
This, if I understand correctly, leads to an imbalance in the development
of the individual, a weakening of the ego because the function of the
father has been displaced to the state . . .
MARCUSE | 421
A. To the state,
to the media, to peer groups, to the school, whatever it is. Yes.
Q. Does that displacement
imply that the artist today has greater difficulty invoking the aesthetic
because the repression is greater?
A. What you say
refers to the increasingly total character of the management and steering
of individuals, of their consciousness and unconscious. The consequence
for art would be that the estrangement factor would be stronger than it
was before. The contradiction of reality in art must be more radical than
it could have been before?because there is more to contradict, to transcend.
If and when practically all dimensions of human existence are socially
managed, then, obviously, art, in order to be able to communicate its
proper truths, must be able to break this totalization in consciousness
and perception and to intensify the estrangement. Here is a difficulty:
Adorno, as you may know, thought that the more repressive corporate capitalism
is, the more alienated, the more estranged art must be and will be. But
if this estrangement goes so far that the work of art no longer communicates,
then any link with the reality is lost in the negation of reality; it
becomes an abstract negation.
Q. But, in a way,
can't this extreme form of art be seen as the "Great Refusal"
without the content?
A. Yes, but the
Great Refusal must in one way or another be communicable, understandable.
If you break off the last remnant of communication, you have art in a
total vacuum.
Q. I don't want
to say that all art tends toward what Adorno is describing as its extreme
form. But I am asking if that form today can serve as a negative focal
point precisely because of a lack of content, its abstract negation?
A. I don't know.
Looking at some of these super-supra avant-gardistic works,
the refusal is lost; it's an intellectual game, intellectual masturbation,
and no more. I may be wrong. I may not have enough affinity with this
kind of art, but that is my experience. It begins already with the later
Picasso works; for me, at least, it is difficult to take them as more
than intellectual or technical games.
Q. Could you characterize
that as art trying to define itself only in terms of art and not in terms
of its situation in the established reality?
422 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
A. Yes, but I would
say that by defining itself only and solely in terms of art, art also
expresses its internal and essential relation to reality. And only in
this form?definition in its own terms?can art carry the indictment and
the negation.
Q. I feel the need
to bring the idea of audience into the aesthetic dimension. I can see
what you are saying about a Rodin sculpture or a play by Shakespeare not
being changed through time; it still is that work, but it seems to me
that our relationship to art does change. Our reading of Shakespeare is
different from that of the audience to which he originally spoke because
our linguistic and social reality is different. The aesthetic we create
is not the aesthetic of his audience, of his creative process.
A. Well, I think
we know the audience of Shakespeare very well. And it seems to me, as
far as I can see, that the majority of the audience was mostly interested
in the murders and battles, or whatever, and didn't give a damn about
the underlying philosophy. Except for "elitist" groups. Our
reading of Shakespeare is, of course, different from that of his average
audience, but there remains a core of identity, affinity grounded in the
transhistorical substance of his work.
Q. To bring this
back to contemporary art, you speak of the totalization of perception
in the established reality as perhaps involving an idea of "mass,"
that we no longer genuinely speak of individuals, we speak of a mass,
of a consumer society in which identity is merged into a single function.
Do you therefore see some kind of relationship between the aesthetic form
and an idea of audience as an aesthetic category?
A. I think it's
a truism to say that without an audience you don't have art. But the question
is whether you can define the audience. Theoretically, the audience is
anonymous. And art written for one particular and definite audience? Take,
for instance, the degree to which Mozart composed for the nobility of
his time. That was composition with respect to a very definite audience.
But it was also more; it was also the negation of this relationship. There
is a dimension in Mozart's music that has nothing to do with a specific
audience; it is the depth dimension of his music which transcends the
particular social determination: the universal appears in the particular!
MARCUSE | 423
Q. But what of
art like that of Beckett, which can't seem to formulate�a positive vision
of the future?
A. I think it is
precisely the total absence of all false hopes that brings out the depth
of the necessary change. It has been said that reality is only adequately
represented in its most extreme forms. In its normal forms, it doesn't
reveal what it actually is. You have, if you want to really judge a repressive
society, to go to the mental institutions, the insane asylums, the prisons,
whatever are the extreme manifestations. Can the same be said with respect
to art?
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